photees

Altru Apparel make some really nice shirts, the sample I have is one of my most worn tees because the tee and the print are just gorgeous. It’s one of those perfect prints that you can barely tell is there even though it’s pretty big. It’s good for me to know that Altru make good shirts, because I know I can rest easy when it comes to recommending them, the whole judgement comes down to whether you like the design and there’s no worry that the tee will look terrible after a couple of washes.

When they let me know that they had some political tees I wasn’t sure if I was going to be happy with what I saw, shirts with a political message tend to be polarising, and that’s usually their aim, but taking the retro angle as they have done here makes for a rather less controversial subject and some pretty neat tees.

I spotted this shirt in one of Rumplo’s newsletters a while back (did anyone else spot the HYA logo shirt in the last newsletter?), it’s funny how cutting up a photo and just showing part of it can result in a shirt that looks so good. Definitely check out the rest of the YCollective site too, lots of good stuff going on there.

I feel a bit bad posting about anything to do with North Korea when people living there will never have the chance to use the internet, or see HYA because they live in such a closed off country ruled by a terrible dictator who will leave the country upon his death to another terrible dictator. But hey, Kim Jong-Il hates Mondays too, ha!

I have no idea why they’ve added the glasses to this picture (they are added, right?), but I think it gives the shirt a twist that makes you give it a second look, and it’s a pretty good image for a tee to start with. That mockup is a little bit shady though, show us the real thing!

It’s pretty rare that a t-shirt company stops me in my tracks (whatever that means, I sit at a desk about 10 hours a day), but Limerence did just that when I saw their designs. When I said a few posts back that I thought 2011 would be the year of the photo tee I was kind of joking, but just a few hours later my prophecy is coming true!*

Sure, they’ve got four shirts in the store, one is a logo shirt (a nice logo shirt, but still), and one is the name set onto photos which is cool though still a bit logo-y for my liking, but the other two are utterly stunning, I’m almost considering bookmarking the Addictive Love for a ‘best of 2011′ post that I will inevitably ‘forget’ to write next December when the lure of mince pies and mulled wine becomes too great. The shirts themselves are produced in the US, but I’m not sure what brand of blank is being used, I do know that the inks are eco-friendly though, so this shirt doesn’t melt the ice caps quite as much as many others do.

For a bit of background, Limerence is from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which is also known as where all those Amish folks come from. Doug, the guy behind Limerence sources all the material for his designs from vintage managzines like a 1950s copy of LIFE or his parents yearbooks, or newspaper clipping, basically anything from before 1974. I’m not really sure where that puts him in terms of copyright law and I’m not going to pretend to have any idea about that kind of thing, but hopefully the images have been manipulated enough for them to be okay in the eyes of the law. It’s funny how willing people are to accept possible copyright infringement when cool tees are involved!

Their website could do with a bit more to it though, it’s just a Big Cartel storefront at the moment. There’s not really anything wrong with that, but they’ve clearly done a photoshoot, and Doug can clearly write judging by the e-mail he sent me, so why not pad out the site a bit more?

*2011 will also be the year of me getting a Ferrari and penthouse apartment in New York, in that case.

So, I was ragging on sites yesterday for not being as well designed as Threadless or someone that has full time web developers on the payroll, yet I’m going to point you in the direction of site where you have to specify what size of tee you’d like as a note when you buy the shirt through PayPal. Clearly, it’s not an integrated shopping experience, but that’s because this isn’t really a t-shirt store, it’s just a designer that made some cool tees and wants to sell them on his portfolio site, so I’m cutting him a bit of slack, especially as his tees are very cool. I’m gonna call it now, I hope/think that 2011 will be the year of the photo t-shirt, and if it isn’t, I’ll write about them more so that it looks like it.

A couple of my friends from Philly recently shipped over a bottle of ROOT, Art in the Age‘s organic liquor, which they cleverly described as a candle to avoid getting caught by customs, so I thought I’d see if there was anything new happening tee-wise with AITA. I don’t really know if this tee is new, but I certainly like it, and I haven’t posted a photo-tee in a long time.

Cheer Up! Clothing are a new company to me, in fact they might just be new in general, but they’ve got a lot of cool tees (and jumpers) that made the process of picking a tee to post pretty tough, so you’ll want to click on through and check out the rest of the site. What put this tee over the top for me was the the fact that it’s a photo tee, and they turn me as weak as I was on Tuesday night after climbing this mountain.

Prestigious have put out a really strong new line recently, the whole thing is very wearable, but I think that this one is my favourite of the bunch, probably because of my soft spot for photo tees is about as tough as warm butter.

I haven’t got a clue what the text says, but this tee is achingly cool, I love it, the only thing that would stop me from wearing it would be if the text said “the dude wearing this is a total tool.” Actually, I’d just say I was wearing it ironically and I’d probably be able to get away with it.

I will grant you that this is a fairly standard design, there’s not really much to a still from a film and a logo, but there’s something about Rocky that makes me feel like it should just be given a pass, and even though it isn’t the kind of shirt that the ‘t-shirt guy’ should be wearing (being a ‘t-shirt guy’ is a lot like indie music, if everyone understands your shirts, there’s no point wearing them) I like it. Also, I was folding some Local Celebrity tees a couple of days ago and I was amazed at how soft they were and how well they’d stood up to multiple washes.

As you may expect, I don’t care for the name of this brand, it’s a bit too in-your-face for me, they describe themselves as a “clothing and partying brand” (they run club nights that attract big-name DJs) so subtlety isn’t really to be expected. Calling your brand ‘Slut’ pigeonholes them somewhat, it takes focus away from the clothing and designs, which is what I’m interested in, yet I’ve spent this opening paragraph discussing the name, see?

Anyway, nice big photo-print of Chruchill holding a pint, I’d wear that on a night out, which is probably what Slut are going for, so it works for me.

This design is absolutely fantastic, it’s almost insulting that I can’t spend more time talking about how much I like it. If you’re looking for a discount code, and why the hell wouldn’t you be, use FML to get 20% off your order.

Usually, when I see a photo tee on the internet, it’s pretty good, but when I see them out on the street, they suck, so the more people out there that are selling photo tees that are ‘done right’ the better, perhaps together we can redress the ‘sucking:not sucking’ balance.

The Oh Snap Project comes from No Star Clothing, who obviously felt that photo tees wouldn’t sit particularly well next to their inventory of funny tees, and created this new site for their photo tee design contest. Yep, that’s right, it is a design contest, with the not-astoundingly impressive prize of $100 per photo (and 4 free tees) that ends up being used on their next round of tees. Submissions are via Flickr, by adding your chosen photo (or photos) to the Oh, Snap! Vol.2 Group.

I’m a fan of photo tees, I don’t get sent many, but I think that they can look really good as part of an outfit, although considering how much I enjoy taking photos it’s probably hardly a surprise that I like photo tees, when they’re ‘done right’, of course.

Sometimes I have to wonder how I get put onto certain mailing lists (the amount of hip hop mixtapes I get sent is astounding), but the niche market of “photo t-shirts with hot asian women on them” is pretty unexpected. It’s also unexpected that there is more than one brand that does this regularly in their collections. I would say this though, once you get past the boobs and look at the regular stuff in Quolomo’s site, it’s actually pretty good.

GORILLI introduces QUOLOMO to Europe

QUOLOMO is a t-shirt, apparel and lifestyle project from Tokyo. Producing clothing under the central theme: “Design Japanese Culture,” QUOLOMO creations and collaborations draw inspiration from the array of sub-cultures, artists, pop-culture personalities and animated characters of Japan. In traditional Japanese language, QUOLOMO means “wear”. When producing t-shirts and apparel, QUOLOMO aims to create wearable garments dedicated to the time tested sensibilities and standards of quality, artistry and originality.

Also, I don’t think anyone has ever sent me an e-mail with 27 attachments on it, but I’m going to put them all in the gallery anyway after a /more, so click on through for more pics.[click to continue…]